Profile：Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Research Fields

Primatology, Comparative Cognitive Science

Research Overview

Matsuzawa has been studying chimpanzee both in the laboratory and in the wild. The laboratory work is known as “Ai-project” in the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University since 1977: a female chimpanzee named Ai learned to use Arabic numerals to represent the number (Matsuzawa, 1985, NATURE). The field work has been carried out in Bossou-Nimba, Guinea, since 1986, focusing on the tool use in the wild. Matsuzawa tries to synthesize the field and the lab work to understand the mind of chimpanzees to know the evolutionary origins of human mind. He published the books such as “Primate origins of human cognition and behavior”, “Cognitive development in chimpanzees”, “The chimpanzees of Bossou and Nimba”.